June 14 – A Thriller for the Grecians

THEY’VE spent most of their existence meandering around the lower regions of English football, with the occasional relegation or, as seen last month, promotion but today in 2002 Exeter City hit the headlines the world over, as the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson visited the club as part of a charity event.

Before Jackson shamoned his way down to the south coast Exeter City’s most famous honour was being chosen to be the Brazilan national team’s first-ever international opponents when they took on the Samba boys in 1914 during a tour of South America , losing 2-0.

The origins of the visit from everyone’s favourite plastic surgery enthusiast stem from the sea of debt that engulfed the side following their 1994 relegation from Division Two. The hard-up minnows struggled for cash, managing to limp along until 2002 when they were presented with a saviour in the form of spoon-bending nutcase Uri Geller. Yes, the story gets weirder. Geller said that he wouldn’t use his ‘powers’ to influence Exeter’s performance on the pitch and he wasn’t lying as the club finished bottom of the whole football league in his only season at the club.

Exeter midfielder John Wilkinson said at the time: “Uri used to come into the changing room bending spoons and that before games, handing everyone a spoon and saying, ‘I want you to focus on it’. We started giggling and he used to get really angry and storm out, throwing his spoon on the floor.”

It didn’t take long for Geller to turn to daft publicity stunts in order to win over the fans. We’re not sure if he had to resort to some kind of crazy mind games to convince his mate Michael Jackson to make one of his rare public appearances at a charity event at St. James’ Park, but that’s exactly what the rain-soaked public were treated to. In case the day wasn’t bizarre enough box-dwelling magician freak David Blane also tagged along.

Jackson proceeded to drive into the stadium, made a five-minute speech on HIV in Africa, told the 10,000-strong crowd that he thought England would win the forthcoming World Cup before beating it and heading back for cover, leaving Blane to carry out a few tricks to the bemused Grecian fans.

Wacko Jacko was then made a honoury director of the club and Geller harped on about renaming a stand after him before the fuss died down as City’s chances of avoiding the drop became slimmer than their most famous fans’ nose.

Geller was gone after a year and life went back to normal for the club whose five-year spell in the Conference came to an end at Wembley after the play-off final. Still, it was fun while it lasted as Wilkinson remembers, “It was a crazy time. I’d love it if Michael Jackson was at David Blaine’s house now thinking, ‘Oh, I must just check how Exeter got on. I wonder if Flacky [Steve Flack] scored again?’”

Instead of inflicting all you Grecian fans with your former director’s greatest hits we’ll instead show you footage of the club taking Manchester United to the wire in the 2004/05 FA Cup. Imagine what could have been below, and if we’ve got ‘Billie Jean’ out of our head by tomorrow we’ll be back tomorrow with another story featuring one of today’s more random protagonists.